Chinese Papers in Nanotechnology

Well, I was going to wait before starting on nanotechnology, but I don't have a convenient place to park this information, so you get it in toto:

From PhyiscsToday.org: "A paper by Ping Zhou and Loet Leydesdorff (PDF) suggests that China is rapidly developing research expertise in nanotechnology. Six years ago, US-based scientists published 50% of the papers in the journal Nanotechnology and China accounted for zero. Today 25% of papers in the journal are from US-based scientists and 15% from China. Zhou and Leydesdorff report that between 1999 and 2005, for 85 journals in the fields of chemistry, physics and material sciences that are relevant to nanotechnology, the number of papers published by China rose exponentially to 8.34%, while papers published by other countries either remained steady or declined. China's overall world share in science journals is 6.52%, suggesting that China is aiming to be at the forefront of research into nanotechnology."

The paper this article is based on talks about a ratio between GDP and R&D, the return of overseas scholars and other factors. The paper then details research that looks like what we're trying to do here--except they're doing it a lot more... scientifically. They even call it scientometric analysis! I'm going to steal that...

Where I am using crude statistics available for free and for fun, they use "indicators like total publications, total citation rates, percentage of world share of citations, as well as the top one percent of most highly cited papers in order to measure scientific output."

Something else I'm going to have to look at--"For the input indicators, we used the OECD's Main Science and Technology Studies published online and in print (OECD 2004)." Like me, they experienced difficulty in searching large databases of publications. They found their own solution, but it won't help me going forward.

Some interesting findings:

• Between 1999 and 2004, China moved from 10th to 5th place in terms of overall scientific publications
• The overall US share has dropped from 35% to 30% between 1992 and 2004 (but if the overall number is rising, who cares?)
• Countries where English is commonly spoken (and written, obviously) appear to have an advantage when it comes to having your paper cited by others
• More than 4,400 science and technology journals were published in China in 2001
• Half a million articles are published annually in Chinese journals
• It appears that Chinese scientists read the work of scientists in other countries, but that international scientists don't read (or at least don't cite) work published in Chinese journals (with the exception of some Chinese journals that are published in English)
• The Chinese government declared nanotechnology a critical R&D priority in 2001, and a group of commissions and ministries issued a strategic plan for development of nanotechnology through to 2010
• Definitions are tough. It was hard for the researchers to find all nano-related papers, and only nano-related papers. (I know what that's like--and what it means. You actually have to read, instead of count, and that takes time)
• The paper's authors use really, really cool graphs to show their work. I am extremely jealous

Now I just have to find out where they got those numbers at the end of the news release...  they could have listed those 85 journals...